Ripping in FLAC with my laptop
 

I've recently switched to ripping my CDs in FLAC using my laptop, as it's a lot faster, although i've found the drive has different settings than my desktop one.
I'm ripping in secure mode, the results sound fine, but it seems both drives have 'use accurate stream' enabled, although my laptop one does not auto detect 'defeat audio cache', where as my PC drive does, and instead it detects 'make use of C2 pointers', which my PC drive dosn't.

I just wanted to check that these settings will still give me the best results, before I started ripping my entire collection :tpg:

Additional Spam:
Also, on both my laptop and PC, I am unable to rip the Narnia LWW soundtrack. If I use secure it takes like 3 hours and I get sync errors, and if I use burst it rips, but the tracks are crazy, skipping all over the place non-stop. Odd.

I notice the CD has one of those stupid data files in the tracklist. Maybe that has something to do with it.


Edit - 3 drives i've tried ripping it on now. Secure and Burst both give crazy skipping tracks.

Sounds like the problem isn't with your software, it's with the hardware. Probably the disc itself. Is it all scratched up?

So which settings are you using exactly? It sounds like you need to enable audio cache (apparently not the best thing) & C2 error correction for the drive. Also, as a bonus, make sure you are using the correct offset for you particular drive. The Accurate Rip website should have it.

If you don't have C2 error correction enabled for the drive and it is capable of it, you should definitely turn it on! That might help with all the crazy skipping tracks.

Well the laptop ripping and disk problem were meant as two different questions :) I was just wondering whether not having the 'defeat audio cache' enabled for my laptop drive would affect the quality of any of my CD rips. I auto detected and that's what the results were. I make sure the offsets are correct for each drive :)

As for the Narnia CD, it has a few light scratches, but it seems OK. I think it might be to do with the data track. When it loads up on the PC it opens some lame media player and plays it, so EAC must be picking up that program/file in the tracklist. I seem to remember having the same problem with another CD, with it picking up a data track, although I think that one ripped OK, it just took hours. This one however rips the disk but every track is crazy.

Ok, try disabling Autorun. Hold down shift while inserting the CD into the drive. Then try ripping again to see if it makes any difference.

Also make sure to properly set your laptop drive's Offset Correction, AccurateRip will have it listed.

Does nobody think what I think? Copy protection...

I also have the Narnia score, the limited edition one, dunno if it has a CP though. I can try a rip this evening if that would help you Thalin. However it played back fine with digital extraction on my LG drive, hmm...

Yeah, I suspect it's copy protection. Sneaky bugger must be autorunning some sort of program. I understand Sony BMG used to sneak in their rootkits through this option?

Hmm, I have a unix OS running, so I'm not affected by these funny tools (I even don't have any automounting/autorunning activated).
After the Sony rootkit affair people should now better though. If someone with a little information about current activities in the record industry has still activated autorun features... well, he deserves to be rootkitted ;)

Anyway, I was more thinking about manipulated TOC stuff, bad sectors, etc.
I have a Vanessa Mae album that is incredibly hard to rip because it desyncs all the time. Playing it back with digital extraction is impossible in real-time, because the drive is constantly seeking to keep finding the correct sector. That's a real killer CD, use it thrice on your brand-new drive and it makes it age fast-forward *g*

I think I did use EAC to rip it some time ago (I legally own it, and I'm really not into breaking my hardware so I found it best to create a FLAC rip which I could play back without trouble). But I did it with burst mode and made multiple runs, checking the CRCs I got after each extraction run. They were all identical, so I assume that the probability of non-detected errors is quite low.

When dealing with these types of discs there is always some way to rip them cleanly. Either with EAC (for me the preferred method), or using some other tool like IsoBuster or even CloneCD.
Also you might wanna have an archive of old EAC versions on your system. Some time ago EAC had support for TOC reconstruction and some other neat features, which made it good for breaking the popular audio CD copy protections. However the author got in trouble with the german authorities (we have quite some legal trouble here in Germany, concerning circumvention of copy protection...) and had to remove the functionality from the program again.
Also he had to remove the "bad" versions from his site. But as always there is a mirror on the net :)

Greets,
liquid

This worked! Thanks so much, and for the other advice too :)

It's funny how if you forget to hold shift for like a split second during it's load it goes back to a crazy rip. You have to hold it literally the second the tray closes. Pesky autorun, or whatever it was.

You should just disable it. :)

This is a long shot, but how can I convert a flac rip to mp3?

EDIT: On second though, ignore this post, found Foobar2000.

Might decrease quality. I suggest an MP3 rip right from the CD.

Doesn't matter how you create mp3s, once you convert something from any lossless format (WAV, FLAC, APE, etc.) to mp3 there's an automatic loss of quality, since mp3 is lossy.

I dunno if it's possible to directly convert FLAC to mp3, but I'd recommend converting FLAC > WAV > mp3 instead.

Nonsense

That's only a technical issue. Internally every transcoder first decompressed FLAC to the original waveform and then feeds it into the output encoded (LAME in this case).
The foobar2000 transcoding engine can do this on one step, however internally.... (see above).